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Re: [TCLUG:19794] Downside to Debian?



On Mon, 24 Jul 2000, Dave Sherohman wrote:

> 1)  "Debian is too far behind."  The stable distro isn't updated as often as
> many people would like, but I've had extremely few problems with running
> unstable (and those few were invariably fixed within a day), so this is a
> non-issue for me.  And it's pretty easy to run a mix of versions if you want
> to stick with stable, but need a few things that are only present in
> unstable.

Actually I made a startling discovery the other day: there are *no* PHP4
RPMs anywhere in RedHat's distro *or* libc6 contrib mirrors (that I could
find). Yet even potato (debian's current frozen, soon-to-be-release
distro) has a full complement of PHP packages.

Point: in a growing number of cases, it seems that Debian's growing
developer base and centralized package structure (keeping all packages
well organized into clear, obvious sections) is beginning to really pay
off -- and yes, it seems Debian is pulling ahead of RedHat in keeping
packages current (*hugs*unstable*). :)

> 2)  "Too many things aren't available as debs."  Yes, it's true - for
> whatever reason, Red Hat is the 'default' Linux flavor, so RPMs are a lot
> easier to find than debs.  That's why someone invented alien.

See above. And in addition to alien, there's stow (./configure
--prefix=/usr/local/stow/pkgname; make install; stow -vvv
/usr/local/stow/pkgname), and there's always debhelper for compiling
software into Debian packages. :)

Don't take me too seriously here. I'm just shooting my mouth off again. :)

Pacem in Terris / Mir / Shanti / Salaam / Heiwa
Kevin R. Bullock